Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/412

 400 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS: nus, all those shifting modes of thought are necessary to a true insight. The book of religion par excellence was for Hinton the Bible. He found all his own thoughts implicit in the Bible. But to do so he had not only to read between the lines, but the lines themselves under this process of interpre- tation sometimes vanished altogether. The Bible became a palimpsest. Had Hinton been familiar with the Talmudic and Alexandrian schools of exegesis and what results were rendered possible by their methods, it is difficult to imagine he would have fallen into a like maze of fancy. It is pro- bable, indeed, that he actually realised its invalidity and in the " Autobiography " he compares his use of the New Testament to the use the New Testament writers made of the Old. The character of this method which is so per- sistent throughout Hinton's MSS. and its curious resem- blance to that of the Fathers most touched by Gnostic influence may best be shown by an example. Clement of Alexandria finds that Abimelech looking through a window at Isaac sporting with Rebekah is a type of Christ, and asks : " But what was the window through which the Lord showed Himself? Doubtless it was the flesh wherein He was manifested." This of Hinton's is parallel : " ' Of the water of life freely '. Is there not something farther to be seen here ? Why water ? Which is the hydrogen and which the oxygen?" Or this, speaking of the analogy of spiritual action to the wind rather than to vapour, and how inspiration is a breathing : " Does it not mean that balloons are not to be permanently a failure ? " And again in the last year of his life he writes, in a passage less absurd but perhaps more characteristic : " Thinking of the sacrifice of Isaac, observe : the bound thing is all ready to be slain ; is on the point of being so ; and so was not the ' reason ' at the very point to be killed at the time of Copernicus ? And this bound thing is because so bound and ready to be slain to have full dominion ; it is to rule and rule perfectly. (So with the emotions now). And the ' ram ' might have two interpretations ; it might be the fact in Nature which gives the interpretation. Or is it rather the false attitude of mind, the yielding to sense-impressions, the not-regard ? " But the insight is there nevertheless, and whenever Hinton abandons the search for a scientific metaphysics, the strange and fanciful exegesis, when he deals rather with what he called " affirmations of the moral sense," his words often attain with perfect sureness the expression of those aspects of the world which satisfy the heart. " The true aspect of religion," he says, " is not : Things are bad take care ;